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A dream the other night, traceable I think to a discussion I’d read on Metafilter, one of those absurdly Millennial Moments that the medium delivers.

I was sitting in a courtroom waiting to testify as an expert witness. It seemed that the accused had ignored a “MEN WORKING” sign and driven a car straight into a worker, who happened to be a woman. The lawyer for the defense was mounting the argument that the sign was contractual and did not include or imply women workers, therefore no offense had been committed. To hold otherwise was to identify women as men, an intolerable injustice to women and to men alike. I was expected to testify for the prosecution on the history of pronouns in various languages, demonstrating through the magic of philology that gender identification is not primordial to having existence as a person.

The worst of it is that when I woke up, I figured that a majority of the present Supreme Court would probably think that the defense’s sophistry was a pretty cool way to deny an injured person benefits and damages.

When I went to Yale in the early 1980s, I remember going to Geoffrey Hartman’s office hours one rainy day and seeing a bucket on his desk, receiving the regular drops from the ceiling. The 1890s neo-Gothic tower was showing its age. And we thought this was normal. Nobody complained. A sense of impending doom was widely shared, but the feeling wasn’t one of crisis or outrage; it was just the way things were. We entered New Haven through a cement-block tunnel that ended in a galvanized-metal shed because Metro-North had closed the Beaux-Arts station for indefinite repairs. The gym had squash courts, to be sure, but the idea that a college is supposed to be a spa or a cruise ship had not yet dawned in the rusty Northeast. Anyway, the college students were better treated than we were. The point of coming to Yale was not to be pampered but to be initiated into a way of thinking and seeing that admitted the nitty-gritty, the uninspiring, and the fact that it’s not all about you. One of our teachers had said:

The dynamics of the sublime mark the moment when the infinite is frozen into the materiality of stone, when no pathos, anxiety or sympathy is conceivable; it is, indeed, the moment of a-pathos, or apathy, the complete loss of the symbolic.

(Paul de Man, “Kant’s Materialism,” in Aesthetic Ideology)

And as we looked into the future, the loss of the symbolic seemed a good bet.

Technically correct rhetorical readings may be boring, monotonous, predictable and unpleasant, but they are irrefutable… consistently defective models of language’s inability to be a model language.

(“The Resistance to Theory”)

“Consistently defective” just about summarizes the world we entered when we took up residence in New Haven. We knew that there were other schools where the plumbing worked and the faculty entertained you. We just didn’t think that that was the way to face the apocalypse, the end of the book and the beginning of writing, late capitalism, the collapse of the Imaginary into the Real, or (choose your own adventure).

Many episodes later, here I am again confronting the consequences of deferred maintenance to house and body. The end of summer has brought us up to baseline, or so I permit myself to hope. The cracked flashing has been sealed, the water damage it caused (peeling surfaces and bulging woodwork) scraped, filled and repainted, the hinky plumbing has been repiped, the upstairs bathroom retiled, some circuits rewired. My hearing, disastrously defective in the upper registers, is now supplemented by a pair of sporty and expensive hearing aids. The second of two teeth I cracked by biting on the wrong things has received the titanium post for its implant. I wouldn’t exactly say that all’s right with the world, but the bucket is momentarily off Mr. Hartman’s desk, and my checking account is a good bit lighter. On to the next challenge, entropy be damned!

I don’t know if you’ve seen this opinion piece from the nether regions, but the NSA wants US business to develop its technology, build its infrastructure, and staff its projects. There is actually a compelling reason for this, which I will get to shortly. The given reason is that the clear and present dangers facing the intelligence community, and, by extension, the world, warrant it. These dangers also warrant weakening the Fourth Amendment in order to save it, a point of NSA argument which one could see coming a mile away.

Here is the actual reason the NSA wants US business to hand over its technology, infrastructure, and staff. It is one of the worst places to work in the tech industry. It couldn’t keep talent if it tripled its pay and brought in massage chairs and free dry cleaning. The word from my friends in Silicon Valley is that they are besieged by NSA workers longing for freedom (and higher pay). This means not just the hot young talent who can field offers from Facebook and Google, but the “lifers,” the people who crafted the MS-DOS exploits of the 1980s in hand-tuned 80286 assembler. They all want out. First of all, management has done for creative hacking what the TSA has done for air travel. They were stung by Snowden, so they are consumed by making sure the exact same thing never happens again. That means an environment of complete distrust by management, insertion of cumbersome steps into processes to make them “more secure,” and interrogations of harmless workers to make sure they feel the heat. I cannot think of a worse place for people who have to be supremely creative and imaginative. Second, I cannot imagine what the NSA is being asked to do under the Trump administration. I cannot see the bottom of it, and probably most of the remaining employees can’t, either.

So, the NSA wants US businesses to do its recruitment, training, and retention. This means that no one has to work at the NSA. They will work at the Big Five, or perhaps as defense contractors. But NSA HR, government pay scales, and the puppet masters themselves are not supposed to be visibly part of the deal. It’s the kinder, gentler way of getting to know everything about everybody; Facebook has collected this information from citizens voluntarily for more than a decade. As for the clear and present dangers, it’s between them and climate change. Simon and Garfunkel wrote, “When you’ve got to choose/Every way you look at this you lose.” Cold-War-style “We’ve got to keep up before they do to us what we want to do to them” has no traction compared to implacable climate change. By the time the NSA achieves its goal of total information hegemony, Fort Meade will be underwater.

We’ve just purged our user database of bot/one-shot logins, and there have been quite a few of them. If you’re not an agent working for one of the nation-states we’ve crossed over the years, or a running dog of dictators, feel free to create a new login and comment.

National Weather Service
1325 East West Highway
Silver Spring, MD 20910

Dear Sir or Madam:

Your cowardice under fire from a tweet will make you the laughingstock of every downstream consumer of your data and products, many of whom have both your data and your algorithms. I daresay that you have also earned the derision of every doctoral program in meteorology in this country.

Subordinating empirical data to political dictates
is never a good idea – look at the biologist Lysenko in the Soviet Union. There
are people on this planet who have undergone the keenest hardship to maintain
the integrity of scientific theories and information. The greatest example of
this has to be the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was forced to recant
and spend the rest of his life imprisoned in his house because of his idea,
derived from that of Copernicus, that the earth revolved around the sun. Privately,
he did not recant, saying “Eppur si muove.” History does not make much
of that Pope and his Inquisitors; it has made Galileo both a secular martyr and
one of the first true scientists.

The next time you get a nastygram on Twitter, trust
in your data and your algorithms, and forecast accordingly. I realize that you
have spouses and children, and have to eat, but there are many jobs you can do,
out of the sphere of the public trust, that will feed you adequately.

It should have surprised nobody that the “gay gene” doesn’t exist. I’m probably what might be considered a member of the control group, a heterosexual, cis-male individual with no particular fetishes, practicing the mid-century American model of serial monogamy, currently partnered, trauma history unremarkable, libido neither too low nor too high, still in procreative age — and I find sex extremely complicated, with at least four hundred little switches that must be turned on or off, together or in sequence, for the slightest sexual act or even frisson of interest to occur. (And that’s just on my side!) So how could there be one master switch to set somebody’s system on a definite path (one which branches infinitely anyway, like all other life paths)? The simple-mindedness of such assumptions reminds me of the bartending lady in The Blues Brothers, who, asked what kind of music is played in her club, answers, “Oh, we have both kinds — country and western.”

Something analogous happens in the world of humanistic studies, and it’s been annoying me for decades. This is the “one word” pattern of academic renown. Okay, one word or one phrase. People become famous for a three- or four-syllable expression that serves as synecdoche (or replacement) for their body of work. Laura Mulvey? “Male gaze.” Gayatri Spivak? “Subaltern.” (Actually that was Gramsci, but few remember.) Derrida? “Différance.” Tom Gunning? “Cinema of attractions.” Walter Benjamin? “Aura.” Jürgen Habermas? “Communicative rationality.” Edouard Glissant? “Relation.” Jacques Rancière? “Distribution of the sensible.” Alain Badiou? “Event.” Bruno Latour? “Actor-network theory.” Franco Moretti? “Distant reading.” And so on. It’s not that these bumper-sticker-sized labels are wrong — they can, after all, be discovered in the published writings of the authors they attach to — but that the word or phrase as unit of thought is static, unsubtle, makes people think that to utter the magic word is as good as following the path of argument, and that’s never true. Nonetheless, I see that people who are trying to make a reputation for themselves strive to coin a phrase or hit on a word that will do this magic for them. You want to be the man or woman who can be identified with just such a little tag — and so famous for that tag that people are freed of the requirement to read more of your work than the ten or fifteen letters it contains.

It seems to me a big and important ethical task, if we are going to keep the enterprise of complex thought going, to refuse such handy little tags. Trace the activity of the phrase or the word through the person’s corpus, if you must, take it as a tracer molecule, but don’t suppose that it will tell you what you need to know. The habit of expecting every argument to undermine itself at some point (usually the point where it becomes most urgent), the fated resurfacing of ambiguity, is the correct reflex for the critical mind. Basically, I say, if you can fit it on a T-shirt, it’s spinach and to hell with it. You need to pursue a thought beyond the noun phrase, beyond the sentence, through labyrinths of paragraphs and examples that will challenge and baffle you, or you are throwing away all those years of education for a style of speech that consists of brandishing pennants of conformity. All right, Wittgenstein, “what can be said at all can be said clearly,” but you can’t test an expression for truth or falsity unless it is at least a complete sentence, and it takes more than one sentence to get past the zone where merely grammatical tests of wellformedness fade away and leave us to wrestle with the way things are.

I would even say that the failure to come up with a fetish-word is a qualification, not sufficient of course but plausibly necessary, for interestingness. Or at least that is where my unfinished education leaves me today.

Insomnia sets you up for some funny discoveries. A few weeks ago I was reading through a literary history of China (not entirely off my own bat; it was a commissioned review) and came across this quaint piece of type-casting:

“Chinese civilization resulted from the gradual fusion of multiple sources . . . however, the Yellow River Valley culture obviously played a dominant role” (pp. 1–2). “Harsh living conditions” in the north compelled the members of that culture to “gather their dispersed people together into large and powerful communities”; thus “the ideology of the state reached maturity there far earlier than in other regions” (p. 2).

“In the Yangtze valley, the climate was hot and humid . . . it was relatively easy to lead a simple existence there. Consequently, even though there was a similar need to form large, powerful communities, it was . . . by no means as pressing as that in the north. Thus, in the Yangtze valley . . . the ideology to preserve social order and strengthen community power through restraining the individual was not as well developed as that in the north” (pp. 4–5). In the culture of the North, “music, dance and singing were regarded as the means to regulate community life and to carry out an ethical purpose. . . . The main functions of the arts of Chu are represented, however, in providing the satisfaction of aesthetic pleasure, and in this way fully display the dynamism of human emotions” (p. 33).

I’m quoting from A Concise History of Chinese Literature by Luo Yuming, translated by Ye Yang (2 vols., Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011).

I already sent in my review, but insomnia led me to read Yen Hsiao-pei’s dissertation on paleontology in China. Splendid dissertation, by the way. And in it one finds this:

In his famous article, “Why Central Asia?” of 1926, [Henry Fairfield] Osborn presented a full picture of his idea of human evolution. Developed on Matthew’s framework, Osborn argued that “in lowlands in tropical and semi-tropical regions, where natural resources were abundant, the process of evolution was hindered and even retrogressive; only dry and open regions could stimulate the development of intelligence. The dry uplands of Mongolia and Tibet in Central Asia offered the perfect invigorating environment for the evolution of our ancestors.”

So now you see the measure of academic progress. A theory propounded on racist grounds (for Osborn was eager to refute the out-of-Africa hypothesis about human origins, hence he preferred the dry uplands of Asia as our original homeland) in the 1920s survives as the armature of a literary history in the 2010s. There must be a higher standard.

Philip Larkin was a nasty man. Sylvia Plath was ambitious. Robert Frost could be a jerk. Ezra Pound… well, no need to state the obvious. Robert Lowell, nuts. Sam Johnson was a sweet and kind guy, but we wouldn’t know that were it not for Boswell, who drank too much and was lecherous. Literary biography leaves few looking good, and the funny thing is, in the case of poets a nicely scandal-ridden volume can outsell the complete works of the poet by a factor of a thousand or so. How many who know about Larkin’s racism and misogyny from the bios also own a book of his poems?

Pop has never imagined a traditional domestic life for himself. (In 1969, when Pop was twenty-one and living in Ann Arbor, he had a son, Eric, with Paulette Benson. Eric was brought up by his mother, in California, and lives in Berlin now.) In part, this is why it matters so much to him that his work remain vital. “It’s gotta be fucking good,” he said. “This is what you’ve sacrificed a lot of things for, dude, and this is what you were doing when you weren’t always there for other people, so it’d better be good.”

As with the famous question posed by Freud (“What does Woman want?”), the best answer is always “Ask one.”

光復香港 is one of the things they want. The Guardian translates it as “Reclaim Hong Kong,” which at least has the advantage of not being particularly inflammatory, but misses the point, the flavor and the jibe.

I should mention that some 1.7 million people, about a quarter of the population of Hong Kong, were out in the street peacefully supporting this and a few other slogans this past weekend. That’s quite a turnout.

Various persons who seemingly have an interest in making the protesters’ demands unacceptable have been turning the slogan into something it’s not. “Secession,” they make it say, and mutter darkly about how an independent nation of Hong Kong would be easy prey for the capitalists to recolonize, and so on.

That way of putting things makes China the protector of helpless little Hong Kong, unable to detect where its true interests lie, and the bulwark against the opium-peddling gweilo. But a closer acquaintance with Chinese and Hong Kong history marks that fantasy as dishonest. Even if the alternatives are imperfect, Hong Kong people know enough to choose.

And that’s exactly the point of using guangfu 光復 in a slogan. Go to your dictionary. It means “recover [as in lost territory or lost reputation], restore.” Ever since 1949, one of the mottoes of the Guomindang on Taiwan was guangfu dalu 光復大陸, “recover the mainland,” a prospect that became less and less likely as the years went on. One of the stated policy aims of the People’s Republic since the same time has been to guangfu Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, seen as colonies violently severed from the motherland. Reportedly in 1997, owing to a handover agreement, the PRC did just that. There was rejoicing in Beijing and a much more measured response in Hong Kong.

It’s not that Hong Kongers have gloried in the title of “Crown Colony” or sought to be dominated from afar. They are sick and tired of being a pawn in someone else’s game. What they are asking is to be let alone: to keep the system of relatively accountable government under law, fairly large freedoms of speech and association, and pluralism in other sectors of life, that they have become accustomed to. They are not eager to join such aspects of the “China Dream” as one-party rule, non-reviewable judicial decisions, broad definitions of sedition and subversion, and integration into the pending system of “social credit.” They would like to elect their own representatives from a genuinely diverse spectrum of opinion and manage their own affairs to a greater degree than either Great Britain or China has ever conceded them.

Guangfu Xianggang turns the Chinese-patriotic slogan around in precisely this way. It means “Let Hongkongers recover Hong Kong for themselves.” A high degree of regional autonomy is absolutely possible under the Basic Law of 1997. It’s even guaranteed by it. Beijing, on the other hand, has an interest in portraying differences of opinion as disloyalty and making them punishable. For if Hong Kong got to expand its envelope of democratic rights, what would happen to the rest of China? Isn’t it unthinkable that Shanghai, Chongqing or Urumqi would enjoy such basic rights?

I’m still living with the inverted timezones that you get after a couple of weeks in Hong Kong: sleepy in the afternoon, unstoppable at 3 am. And my fondness for that place, its umbrellas and fearless kids in black, is unaffected one way or the other by distance. Here’s a little homage by Hong Kong to itself. Normal getting and spending suspended (sorry, Bally and Dior, you have prices but no value), the tacky Muzak aufgehoben, even the air conditioning, I imagine, overcome by gasps of astonishment. Seid umschlungen, 7.2 Millionen!

Still, Foucault’s real impact for historians of science has been mediated through the work of history-adjacent scholars like Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1990. The boom in housing prices was taking off steeply, and an assistant professor’s salary would get you a two-room house thirty miles away from my workplace by freeway. Having grown up as a relatively prosperous person in Nashville, with a few years of no-frills but comfortable existence in New Haven, I was unprepared for the demands that California would make on the pocketbook. It was then that I learned the construct [proper-noun]-adjacent, as used by real-estate people. “Beverly-Hills-adjacent” meant a house on an alleyway, facing the garbage cans of a luxurious restaurant, but separated by an imaginary line from the city of Beverly Hills, its glories and fleshpots (including the right of admission to BH High). You can always dream, from across the line!

So Nima’s construction makes me imagine Ian Hacking, who for forty years has been for me the guy I wish to be when I grow up, as a renter whose last pennies every month go to keeping up the appearances of being, almost, a resident of the realm called History, where the grass is green and the living is easy. Save your bottle caps, Ian! One day you will walk in Ferragamos.

Progress without freedom? Is that a willful paradox? Certainly not: we should by now be familiar with the changes in the social fabric around the world that promised freedom to people who would cast off their old ways, and delivered some technological and economic advances that had at best an extremely indirect, and sometimes a contradictory, relation to freedom. I don’t lay the responsibility for this lamentable situation at Goethe’s feet; after all, he was born in 1749, and the world of his adult years was just discovering the concept of progress. But I do note that his model for the inevitable progress of world literature is entangled in a family of concepts that has been put to extremely dubious political and social uses.

Comparative literature, as has been observed countless times by people present here, their teachers, their teachers’ teachers, etc., has long been intertwined with the idea of world literature. Is comparative literature indissolubly wedded to it? Do we have an alternative genealogy, a different schema to orient our research and our action in the world?

We do. Not that we need to claim an ancestor for every idea we put forth, but the fact that someone else conceived of the work of comparison in different ways, as enabling different consequences, should give us heart. Many of you know of Hugo Meltzl de Lomnitz, the German-speaking comparatist who together with the Hungarian-speaking mathematician Samuel Brassai founded the first comparative literature journal in 1877. I do not think it has been adequately noticed to what degree Meltzl’s programmatic editorials are directed against the notion of world literature as put forth by Goethe and his successors. This was, alas, necessary: many of those who praised Weltliteratur in the years of the resurgent Prussian Reich saw in it the triumphant advance of specifically German literary culture to cover first Europe and then the globe.

Meltzl attached comparative literature to what he saw as the interests of humanity in preserving cultural diversity from imperial oppression and the tyranny of bigness. He states:

a journal such as ours makes in principle allowance for every still minor literature, or every literature that is still counted as minor. Indeed, from the comparative-literary standpoint, the importance of one literature at the expense of others ceases completely; – they are all equally important, whether they be mental creations belonging to European or non-European, or cultured or so-called savage, peoples. Indeed, for the languages and folk-song culture of certain small tribes of Europe, which are hated, derided, or, in the best case, regarded with indifference by the larger peoples of Europe with a race-antagonism that can otherwise only be observed in relation to the savages of exotic countries, the comparative principle will offer asylum to the oppressed, and it will be just as accommodating and helpful to all others. [Here we mean especially Jews, Armenians, Gypsies, Chizeroths and Burins (in France), smaller Slavic dialects, Finnish and other Turanian tribes, such as Laplanders; also the dispersed fragments of greater nations, such as: Csángó-Hungarians in Moldavia, and Transylvanian Saxons etc. etc.] In these small and minute folk literatures … there often lies hidden a complete and magnificent world of the most informative and primeval ethnological-literary-historical reminiscences and similar treasures.

As Meltzl observes elsewhere, for a linguist there are no unimportant languages, and a literary scholar should not let hierarchies of value and restrictive notions of genre be the excuse for ignoring vast domains of human history and intellect. His frank hatred of nationalism blends into his contempt for Eurocentrism in such passages as this: “One cannot say that any nation is inferior to another. Cannibals, for example—are they any worse or any poorer than we are? Certainly not, my skeptical friend; they are to be ranked above us Europeans who are so good at murdering each other with the utmost refinement of our torpedoes, our Krupp guns, etc., and equally good at ruining each other with the most shameless usury.” Meltzl’s journal aimed to create awareness and appreciation of writing in Hungarian, an island of difference among the other interrelated literary languages of Europe. Offering translations from the Hungarian, essays in Hungarian, and arguments in German for the value of this supposedly minor literature, Meltzl’s journal demonstrated some of the tendencies of its time in Austro-Hungary, the moment after 1867 when the Kingdom of Hungary got its own parliament back and the notion of relative national autonomy within a federative empire was in the air. Conflicts around ethnic leadership continued to plague Austria-Hungary; in that context, the first comparative literature journal’s policies appear firmly on the side of openness and equality. It frequently published translations of and articles on poetry in dialects, such as Sicilian, Provençal, and Scots, that were being pushed off the map of newly unified and standardizing nations. In a time of pogroms and anti-Jewish hysteria, it celebrates manifestoes of tolerance like Lessing’s drama Nathan der Weise, the object of a special number in 1879.

There is however one noticeable exclusion among the calls for openness. Meltzl refused to count Russian among the ten languages to be used in his journal. Given that the 1870s and 80s were a time of tremendous creativity in the Russian language, with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov all active, this exclusion may seem perverse, and Meltzl offers no explicit reason for it. We can however read fairly clearly between the lines of his editorials, when he says on the one hand that “a very significant political role fell to Russian among the Slavic languages: but this is completely irrelevant in relation to purely literary and comparative-literary-historical matters. Classical and truly universal creations of the mind precisely cannot be created through diplomatic or undiplomatic, through bloody or peaceful, military campaigns.” More energetically, in the second part of Meltzl’s editorial he protested against the tsarist government’s suppression of the “little languages” of the empire.

Our secret slogan is rather: let nationality, as the individuality of a people, be holy and inviolable! … For a human population, however unimportant it may be from the political standpoint, is and remains from the standpoint of comparative literature no less important than the biggest nation. Just as the most imperfect remains of a language can offer the most precious and instructive examples for comparative philology, so is it as well with the spiritual life even of peoples without literature(as we call them), whose national individuality we not only must refrain from disturbing with our missionary meddlesomeness, but which we are obliged to preserve by every honorable means and maintain in the most unaltered condition. (From this comparative-polyglot point of view, the previously mentioned order of the Russian Interior Ministry of May 16, 1876, forbidding the literary use of the Ruthenian or Belorussian language, must still be accounted no less a sin against the Holy Ghost if it had been perpetrated against the folksong traditions of an obscure Kirghiz tribe, instead of against a nation of 15 million.)

With language, of course, went culture, religion, group identity, and the basis for demanding political autonomy; and in 1877, as you’ll recall, the Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Moldavians, and a host of other nationalities, not to forget the Jews, were held tightly and uncomfortably in the grip of Greater Russia. In order to halt the process of nation-building, the minority-language press in Russia was tightly controlled when not, as in this case, simply closed down. Meltzl deems this a “sin against the Holy Ghost,” I suppose because the Holy Ghost is said to inspire both prophecy and translation, and because it is written in the Gospel of Matthew (13:21) that blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven—strong words for Meltzl to be using against a tsar who liked to invoke the will of God as backing for his autocracy. In terms of cultural accomplishment, there was little to distinguish Ukrainians from Meltzl’s Hungarian neighbors: two peoples with a long history of writing and publishing, with libraries, churches, philosophers, poets and dramatists, only one people was subjugated to a harsher empire than the other. But Meltzl’s point is that even if directed against a tiny group with an exclusively oral culture, the offense is equivalent. With his sensitivity to this sort of injustice, Meltzl, I think, would feel quite at home in our age of species extinction, language death, the tyranny of majorities, and the clear-cutting of small cultures.

I would go as far as to say that Meltzl’s little, obscure text offers a cure for Goethean world-literature. Rather than telling us that literature is a competition where bigger will always be better and the weak go to the wall, Meltzl’s vision is of a democracy of letters where nobody is too small to count.

What goes wrong, I think, in the discussion of comparative and world literature is the confusion of cosmopolitanism with bigness, power, wealth, fame, and success. Marx and Engels were not the first, nor the last, to point out how similar the Goethean model is to patterns of global trade and colonization. A similar slide is noticeable in the scholarship. Studies of world literature quickly become studies of the circulation of literature, which means literary markets, the pursuit of prestige, the competition for market share, and that absurd prize they used to give away every year in Sweden. All that is worth knowing and part of the reality of literature, but the literary critic who’s not careful will get swept into “seeing like a state,” as James Scott put it, into thinking that the knowledge that maximizes power is the knowledge that’s naturally most desirable. I am now in a position to define what I meant by “literature with and without borders.” The Goethean program, too, is directed towards a goal that would be a literature without borders. But it would result in one huge literary culture with global circulation, a culture that had surpassed the now obsolete national literatures (“Nationalliteratur will jetzt nicht Vieles sagen.”) Meltzl’s picture of comparative literature disregards the borders because it knows that within and across every border are cultural units that are not accounted for by the borders—the Kirghiz, the Bielorussians, the peasant cultures that he evokes merely schematically; alien cultures surrounded by majority cultures that think of them as backward and undeserving. Previous scholarship on Meltzl has tended to catch itself on the two horns of universalism and nationalism.

But the model of Meltzl’s undertaking is actually somewhat more complicated than is indicated by such polarities and paradoxes. It can be exemplified concretely—I’ll start doing so with an analogy. By drawing up my title as I did, I wanted, of course, to pay homage to Médecins sans frontiers (Doctors Without Borders), the medical charity originating in France and now active in many parts of the world. We probably think of what we do as Literature Without Borders. Yes, but how do we get that way? It’s not enough to pretend to disregard borders, or to apply a psychological eraser to them. Borders are a pesky fact, and for doctors in particular—for doctors are educated in national medical colleges, licensed and renewed by national medical associations, they apply treatments and prescribe medicines according to national schedules, and so forth. Doctors, in short, are very much withborders in the normal way of things. The exception involves a story. Médecins sans frontières began in a crisis. Between 1967 and 1970, the Nigerian government was dealing with a rebellion in the southern province of Biafra, where much of the country’s oil wells were located. They used military raids and blocked the entry of food and supplies, resulting in a disastrous, intentionally-caused famine. A few French doctors sent by the International Red Cross to attend victims of the famine were shocked by what they experienced and when they returned home, broke the tradition of professional discretion, not to mention the carefully maintained neutrality of the Red Cross, and denounced what they did not hesitate to call a genocide. Expecting trouble from the Red Cross, they founded a new organization in 1971 that became Médecins Sans Frontières. Throughout the history of the organization—well chronicled by Peter Redfield—the mandate to serve populations and to testify to their oppression have been in tension. It has often happened that the MSF mission in a country is expelled for what is termed political meddling, a meddling that the MSF personnel feel is necessary in order to prevent greater injustice and suffering.

This schematic history shows us something rather different from the merely categorical or dialectical transcending of a conceptual limit. A crisis occurs, as in Biafra, when people within a set of borders are being deprived of the protections they need to survive. People outside those borders notice. They offer support, guided by the idea of a common humanity or a shared potential that everyone has. And in offering that support they may incur the wrath of the authority that polices the original border and that was causing the deprived population to suffer. This pattern, as I’ve put it in the broadest outline, is common to the origin-story of MSF and to the origin-story of comparative literature if we take Meltzl’s editorials as our canon. The Bielorussians and Ukrainians of 1876 were deprived of their spiritual-material basis, their language and literature; scholars outside the Russian Empire, even though unable to read anything written in those minority languages, rally to the support of the oppressed speakers and writers; and although nothing concrete may be achieved thereby (the ukaz against minority languages was not lifted until 1905), a bond of common humanity is affirmed and the support network is readied for the next time a group of people are barred from speaking and writing in their language, whatever that language may be. If Goethean Weltliteraturhas often been likened to the organs of international commerce, Meltzl’s comparative literature has the profile of an NGO. The latter suggests an identity for Comp Lit that is a little less like Coca-Cola and more like Amnesty International.

Though Amnesty was created in the depths of the Cold War and Médecins sans frontières emerged from the interethnic struggles that followed decolonization, NGOs were a product of the nineteenth century. They go on being necessary even as the element that gave them some leverage—public opinion—fades to insignificance. They will be needed as long as borders are used to block communication, exclude undesirables, and frustrate transparency. The tyrants of the nineteenth century were nothing to those of the twentieth and twenty-first. The prohibitions against which Meltzl rails so vividly—“sins against the Holy Ghost” and so forth—resulted in the deaths or banishments of a few thousand Poles and Ukrainians. That is already too many, but if you think about the means that were put in the hands of the successor states of the tsarist empire, and of other empires and confederations around the world, they shrink in comparison. Nobody, I suspect, in 1877 could have imagined the extermination campaigns, forced resettlements, and forced assimilations of the twentieth century, or that a million or so people could be herded into concentration camps, pressed to forsake their language and culture, and watched at home and in the street by means of human and mechanical spies for any sign of suspected disloyalty; we have made possible an entirely different scale of brutality. So, to sum up: The topic of “world literature” usually goes in the direction of opposing nationalism to cosmopolitanism, the particular to the general. But the emergence of institutions “without borders” has typically involved a different logic: a detour through the subordinated or unwilling national, in the name of whom a cosmopolitan public can be summoned to action or sympathy. Just as Médecins sans frontières arose to confront that form of modern biopolitics that consists in the deliberate abandonment of populations, so Comparative Literature included among its beginnings advocacy for writers muted by national language policies. Though he is infinitely less famous, writing in an obscure self-published periodical for fellow specialists, Hugo Meltzl deserves some of the fame and attention that has gone to Goethe for his statements on “world literature,” and by tracing their different paths we can better understand the powers of our discipline. It is, moreover, Meltzl’s model that stands the better chance of raising “questions that can only be addressed by expanding the repertoire.”

But in the reading of all these dissertations, manuscripts, drafts and articles, we can’t help noticing the same names coming up. Homer. Quixote. Hamlet. Jane Austen. Proust. Kafka. And the tradition of criticism and theory has its all-stars. Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, just to stay in the register of those who have already passed on. And within those critics’ long list of publications, just a few items come up for repeated citation. Indeed, we comparatists have our model organisms and we are often content to keep on extracting new information from them. But whatever the “incredible advances” that may have come from reading and rereading the same books, isn’t it also worth finding out if there are, as Professor Patel promises in his realm of study, “questions that can only be addressed by expanding the repertoire of animals”—sorry, works of literature—“that are studied”?

Here though we get into a different realm of problems. For once we have admitted that we really ought to study a more diverse range of literary works, the suggestions come pouring in, for many among the thousands of neglected works have their advocates. (There is a school of thought that says we should hand off the unread works to computers, to graduate students, or to native informants to read for us, but I reject that as being inequitable and a sure way of keeping the existing hierarchies in place.) Should we sort the available reading material by authorial gender, skin color, religious affiliation, citizenship, class status? Fine; but are those criteria created to suit the picture of the world we already have, or are they apt to disturb the pre-existing categories? There are national interests promoting the Great Writers of this or that country, as allegedly there are delegations sent to lobby the committee members of the Nobel Prize for literature. There’s some justice in this. Here we are talking about the issue of literary cosmopolitanism in a Special Administrative Region of China. It would not be a bad thing if every member of the ICLA had spent at least a week reading the great poets and novelists of China before coming. I don’t know if that has happened. I recommend it though. However, even if you acquire those works in translation or spend a few years learning enough Chinese to read them in the original, you will still have to work out the conceptual apparatus with which you’re going to handle these texts. What in them strikes you as good or bad may not have much to do with the good or bad as judged by Chinese readers of different eras. What seems meaningful or artful to you may not have ever caught the attention of a Chinese reader. Not that the non-Chinese reader must abide by the judgments of Chinese readers; but when you’re dealing with a different intellectual world, I think you should at least figure out what the local expectations are, even if in the end you depart from them. Or imagine that you are a Chinese student embarking for the United States or Poland or Egypt to study literature. You have in your bag the eighteenth-century novel Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber), a well-worn copy that you’ve been reading since you were a teenager. To explain to your teachers and fellow students in that foreign land what you’ve found precious about that book will be no easy task, as the terms of value you’re used to using don’t have easy equivalents. You may have to fall back on the most general sort of recommendation (“read it, it’s great, we all love it”). Or you can describe it in the terms circulating in the classrooms where Homer, Proust, Defoe and the gang are taught, an alienating and possibly exciting experience. Translators, of course, have to use the terms of the language they translate into. The same goes for interpreters. David Hawkes, the extraordinary English translator of the first two-thirds of the Story of the Stone, tried to express something of what he had experienced by reading and thinking about that novel for several decades when he dubbed it “a Symbolist novel.” Now of course the literary histories will tell you that Symbolisme is a particular outgrowth of certain cultural and intellectual trends in Europe, etc., and that the application of the term to a Chinese document can only be a kind of analogy. Nonetheless, if you know what Symbolism is, Hawkes’s use or misuse of the term directs you to certain properties of the novel that are at least more interesting as a description of its world than would be, say, “realist,” “romantic,” “allegorical,” or a handful of other words that have been offered as blanket descriptions of this tremendous and internally variegated book. Hawkes did what he could and his can never be the final word. But the imperfections of his strategy remind us that it’s not enough to read exotic books, we have to have a new or at least an open-ended terminology, a poetics, with which to understand them. You would not get much out of Chinese drama if you came to it with the expectations of a person familiar only with Greek, Shakespearean, or Brechtian drama; the conceptual vocabularies afforded by that prior experience would not get you far, and you would need to learn more from the plays and from the people who have given them their attention over the years. Not only what to read, but how to read must be controversial; and in choosing how to read we can’t be led by authorities, for the same national, class, religious, gender and other partial interests are just as eager to impose on us the official way to read as a woman, as a Korean, as a nomad, as a proletarian, and so forth. Since disagreements make the life of culture, let us not, in the name of diversity, imprison ourselves in a new type of uniformity. Now what does this mean for practical undertakings? What should I tell you to do? (As if a room full of highly-accomplished, autonomous people will ever do as they’re told.) What would be good for the field, what should we encourage and what should we stop doing? I don’t think we need to mandate diversity, require people to read more texts from previously under-discussed cultures, though doing so is beneficial. Nor should we stop giving prizes for books about Proust; I’m sure there are still great books about Proust to be written. This kind of diversity slating involves a predefined set of criteria and can be gamed, like any diversity mandate, to achieve results that are only superficially diverse— what one of our confrères has called “a compromise between foreign [i.e., European] form and local materials.”

If it has to be a compromise, I would prefer it the other way round. What we should reward is reading that seeks to make discoveries, to put what’s known on one side, to circumvent the inherited definitions. This desire admittedly puts us on boggy intellectual ground: if we can’t be sure that we have a definition of literature that is cross-culturally valid, how do we shepherd the examples into the Noah’s Ark of comparative literature? The vague rule of thumb that seems to operate permits the continued recruitment of poems that look like those of Goethe or Wordsworth, novels that look like Trollope’s, and so on. Let’s imagine a more abstract definition and see what it includes. You know such previous attempts at an abstract definition as Shklovsky’s, Tynianov’s and Eikhenbaum’s, definitions that could contain quite a lot of phenomena that were not recognized as suitable objects of study by faculties of literature in their time. Maybe these can serve as opening moves in our attempts to find what we can learn from the verbal culture of this or that non-mainstream population. What are the uses of language in culture X that cause it to do more than proffer information or convey demands? What specific kinds of relation obtain between the merely functional acts of speech and those that are memorable or impressive for some other reason? What is the biggest scope of variety that we can anticipate among cultures X, Y, Z and on to infinity? On what scales, with what instruments, can we recognize our new model organisms?

I see these perplexities about what to read and how as being already inscribed in that foundational text for many of us, the conversation between Goethe and Eckermann in 1827 that launched the term Weltliteratur, “world literature.” I’m sure you already know it and so I can be brief in outlining the problem areas. Eckermann finds Goethe reading a Chinese novel and says, oh, how strange that must be, and Goethe replies that it’s actually not a bit strange, but quite like the novels of Richardson and the like: tales of civilized conversation and flirtation between men and women, only of course with a lot of unusual cultural background. And then Goethe goes on to predict that the age of world literature is at hand, and that national literature is already rather meaningless: everybody does and should read books from all around the world. So far so good. Then Goethe seems to take a step back, because he says that where aesthetic criteriaare concerned, the only way is to take our bearings from the ancient Greeks, who were and are the true classics. “We must not think that the Chinese are the thing, or the Serbians, but in our need for something exemplary we must always go back to the old Greeks…” All right then! The inventory of things to read is wide open, but the methods, the standards, the how and why to read—those we have already in the form given us by the ancient Greeks.

Reassuring, isn’t it, as a program for world literature? You can read anything, but you won’t have to learn any fundamentally new tricks. In fact, if you are tempted by the norms and modes of Chinese, Serbian, etc., literature into thinking there may be some new aesthetics and hermeneutics out there worth acquiring, you should strenuously withstand that temptation. The true image of humanity in its beauty, says Goethe, has been discovered once and for all. Other nations can at most provide quaint diversions; only the Greeks can be our guides. So enjoy diversity from the safe harbor of uniformity. As a description of what people actually do, I think this is not far off, but it doesn’t describe what I think we should do if we want to enlarge our repertoire of “model organisms.” And something else in this Goethean program is as if calculated to get my back up. That is the rhetoric of the inevitable march of history, the subsumption of local differences into a unity, the consigning of what local, idiomatic and specific to the past: “National literature is now nearly meaningless… the age of world literature is at hand… everyone must contribute to hastening its approach.” Such language has, to my ear, a tyrannical ring, the chant of progress without freedom. “There is no alternative” (Margaret Thatcher); “we will bury you” (Nikita Khrushchev); “resistance is futile” (the Borg, from Star Trek); bigness wins and wins absolutely.

The South China Morning Post calls them “anti-government protestors.” Le Monde calls them “des militants prodémocratie.” These terms are not necessarily convertible, of course. But it matters how you frame a thing.

I’ll begin, as I often do, by looking over at what the scientists are doing. Or at what some scientists are doing, as they notice what other scientists have been doing and not doing. My text for this exercise is short and non-technical. It comes, in fact, from the announcement of a talk given recently at the University of Chicago Center in Hong Kong, by one of my colleagues, Nipam Patel who runs the Marine Biology Lab. So although we work at the same institution, thanks to the incredible diversity of academia, a lot separates us. He’s in the water whereas I’m in the air; he’s on the beach for work, whereas I go to the beach on vacation; and there as many other contrasts as you can imagine. Still, I feel that he and I are bothered by the same things. Here is the announcement of his recent talk:

Scientists often depend exclusively on so-called model organisms, such as fruit flies, mice, and frogs, for their research. While investigation of these animals has led to incredible advances in both basic and translational biology, they represent only a tiny slice of the diversity of life on earth. Professor Nipam Patel will explore questions that can only be addressed by expanding the repertoire of animals that are studied.

You might be misled by the phrase “model organisms.” It doesn’t necessarily mean that these are the best examples to study, the most exemplary organisms, or the ones other organisms should aspire to emulate. The natural scientists I know are ticklish about questions of value and feel more comfortable concentrating on what is. “Model” is not here a normative term, as often in the humanities (if I say in a letter that my student has written a model dissertation, that’s strong praise and you should hire her right away). The word “model” is used here neutrally to refer to an empirical, historical fact. Organisms become model organisms not because of some intrinsic quality but simply because they have already been studied in depth, they’re well understood, and the results of this research are available for the whole scientific community to explore. The reasons for selecting these organisms come down, usually, not to their utility for pure science, but for other reasons: because of their accessibility (that’s the case for the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, with its mere four sets of chromosomes and its speedy reproductive cycle; it was first identified as a useful laboratory animal in the 1880s) or because of their economic utility to humans. If tobacco and corn were not basic to large profitable industries, I am sure their biology would not be nearly as well-known as it is, and as it happens more is known about tobacco and corn than about almost any plant. Although “model” is used in the natural sciences, as I have said, in a way that does not have the same strong connotations of perfection and desirability as it does in the humanities, there are still some value-based factors behind the choice of objects of study. We value our time, so we should start with organisms that are simply to understand, plentiful, or easy to deal with in a laboratory setting; and because we value things that make our lives possible or enjoyable, or that promise huge fortunes, it’s understandable that we would direct attention selectively toward the plants that serve such functions.

There’s no problem with the fact that a few organisms get all the attention, as long as we don’t suppose that those are therefore the organisms that deserve all the attention. And Professor Patel’s point is precisely that attention can and should be distributed more widely. To quote the abstract once more: “While investigation of these animals has led to incredible advances in both basic and translational biology, they represent only a tiny slice of the diversity of life on earth. Professor Nipam Patel will explore questions that can only be addressed by expanding the repertoire of animals that are studied.” All right then! Here’s where I climb onto the coattails of my eminent colleague. For we in literary studies too have our “model organisms.” If I say the word “tragedy,” or “lyric,” or “novel,” you will certainly be able to come up with a description or even a definition of those genres, and because you are comparatists, you’ll have more than one example, from more than one period and language, for each; but at the back of our definitions is usually an example held by the people in our subfields to be the typical, or the most rewarding, or the most complete case of the thing we are talking about. Otherwise the conversation we are always having, the comparing and evaluating and appreciating, can’t happen. The model examples of our model examples are easy to locate. For the word tragedy, most of us will think back to Aristotle’s meticulous investigation of that Greek genre which took Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex as the ideal example. For epic, where would we look but in Homer? If, however, we extend our consideration to epics from other times and places, for example Indian or Turkic or Tibetan epics, we’ll soon be discovering the limits of our comparison-case. Not every epic behaves like a Homeric epic, and the differences are not necessarily flaws. It is surprising that, three hundred years and more after regular cultural communication among the educated people of the various continents has been opened, we are still reasoning about epic, lyric, drama, the novel, the Bildungsroman, the pastoral, ekphrasis, and so on, on the basis of a really very small set of examples. As a result, generic definitions are often either brittle or shallow. If you want to talk about the world novel, you have to start from the implication that a novel is something like Quixote or Pride and Prejudice or War and Peace, or else by positing a primordial shift from the epic mode of narration to the novelistic one, or some such gesture that gives you a basis whereupon to recruit your examples. There’s also often a claim of inheritance: the novel of 1800, or the novel in Indonesia, can be explained as an effect of emulation of the novel of 1700 or the novel in Spain, France, or England. The embarrassment is that among the world’s great novels there are quite a few that originate separately from such genealogies, don’t entirely fit the models provided by the traditions that are familiar to people working in European languages, and can in fact call into question the usefulness of the category “novel”: such as the Tale of Genji, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and so forth. This is what I mean by brittleness and shallowness: either your definition of the novel clings so tightly to a few examples that it will break if you try to detach it from them, or it covers all possible instances at the price of saying not very much about them. I’m not very happy about this condition of the critical language, and I’ve tried to deal with it as I can, in the same way many of us do, by putting in modifications. These modifications tend to segregate and specify. A good example is Walter Benjamin’s study, now nearly a hundred years old, on what he called Trauerspiel or “mourning play,” which is translated into English in the title of his famous book as “German Tragic Drama.” From the moment we read those words we know that we are not embarking on a discussion that puts those 17th-century German plays in the lineage of ancient Athenian tragedy, mostly because, put up against those classic examples, the German plays will sound awkward, contorted, corny, even comical. So by affixing a new name to this genre Benjamin could declare their independence from the classical models, and investigate them as a body of works having their own aesthetics, purposes, and effects.

What is wonderful about this way of proceeding is that, after Benjamin had made strong claims for the singular qualities of these admittedly strange plays, his readers began to see the classical tradition in a different light. You might realize that, in their way, the plays of Aeschylus are Trauerspiele. Seneca might be aiming at effects that the German closet dramatists achieved as well. We see new things in familiar works, non-classical things in classical works. The intensive scrutiny that Benjamin gave to his model organism did in the end bring to literary studies what Professor Patel calls “incredible advances in both basic and translational biology.” Or rather—I quoted a little too much in the literal mode—“incredible advances in both theoretical and programmatic poetics.” Benjamin showed us, through his eccentric choice of model organism, how to value certain kinds of writing, previously undervalued, and how to outline ways of responding to drama that had not been tried yet but that might be exactly what certain writers and audiences needed.

We all read a lot of dissertations, a lot of manuscripts submitted for journals, a lot of drafts by friends and colleagues. And you know just by being a member of a field what the “model organisms” permitting analysis and generalization in that field are. No one in American literature can escape the necessity of referring to the many analyses, including some classic analyses, of Walden, or Moby-Dick, or The Sound and the Fury. In your apprenticeship as a member of that field you study previous dissections of those corpora in order to learn how to do it yourself on the same or different corpora. No one in Chinese poetry can avoid analyzing Guan juor Qiu xing ba shou or Qian hou Chibi fu, or drawing on the canonical previous interpretations of them. These are the organisms that are best known, and that therefore make possible the smoothest and richest communication among people who share that knowledge. An unintentionally humorous reference to this practice occurs in Goethe’s novel The Sufferings of Young Werther, when Werther and Lotte stand together at the window watching a thunderstorm.

The thunder was passing by and a wonderful rain was falling on the land, filling the warm air with the most refreshing fragrance. She stood there resting on her elbows, gazing deep into the country about us; she looked to the heavens, and at me, and I saw there were tears in her eyes; and she laid her hand on mine and said ‘Klopstock!’ At once I remembered the glorious ode she had in mind…

It takes only one word, one poet’s name, to make a rich and dense communication possible: that’s the value of a shared model organism. It would have been better academic form, however, if she had said “cf. Klopstock.”

Pushkin’s self-epitaph “Exegi monumentum” imagines that his voice will live on in the many tongues of the Russian empire; post-mortem, he will be spoken anew by the Poles, the Finns, and by “the Kalmyk, friend of the steppes.” Pushkin knew a bit about the edges of empire, having been exiled to the Caucasus for irreverent speech. In his travels he had encountered members of the nomadic Mongol lineage known as the Kalmyks. Sixty years earlier, Ji Yun had been summoned by the Qianlong Emperor to compose an extempore ode on the return of the Torghuts, another branch of the same lineage that had wandered west, settled on the banks of the Volga, and eventually migrated back to China in order to resettle the frontier areas of Xinjiang depopulated by Qianlong’s campaign against the Zunghars. Taken together, these examples of “frontier poetry” stage a quasi-encounter in verse between the imaginations of the expanding Russian and Qing empires, at the expense of nomad groups that could hardly find recognition except as vehicles of that expansion.

I happened to be reading the Federal Register and came across this choice gem. The Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is poised to modify Obamacare in a curiously Trumpian way. It is withdrawing health care facilities’ mandate to serve people who speak little or no English. No more multilingual placards. No more mail in a patient’s native language. No more translators to tell staff what a patient is saying and vice versa. This will make it much harder for people who know little English to find appropriate and safe health care, to be informed about the care that they are getting, and to give informed consent to that care.

At the top of the document is a big green button saying “SUBMIT FORMAL COMMENT.” Do it. Push that button, and write your heart out about about the inequity of treating people with limited English as pariahs, the false economies given as support for such treatment, and the consequences of letting someone into the ER who has Ebola who can’t tell you because he only speaks French and there’s no interpreter.

The closing date and time for comments is August 13th at 5:00 PM EDT. As of this writing, you have 16 days to submit a comment.

I sometimes think the Guardian exists to make us feel that voting is useless and there are no differences among candidates. Witness today’s article about Lori Lightfoot, the newly-elected major of Chicago. Lightfoot hasn’t been sworn in yet and won’t be for another six weeks, and Arwa Mahdawi is already trying to push her into the political graveyard.

Don’t let us catch you doing anything constructive, earthlings!

Is the Grauniad in a sulk? Or are they on a mission to teach us all learned helplessness?

People are jumping to conclusions about the Mueller report– which hasn’t been released yet. Trump supporters are, of course, spinning it their way, which is that the whole thing was a smokescreen and everyone who was expecting Trump to be indicted should go to jail instead. That’s what you’d expect from a bunch of people who have made no secret of their contempt for journalism, investigation, science, and rationality in general. But it’s more discouraging to see anti-Trump people turn bitter and pretend that they never expected it to be anything but a whitewash.

The crucial, the one crucial, fact is that the public has not yet seen the report in its entirety. Nothing less will do. Get on the phone right now, as I did, and call your Congressional representatives to demand that the report, the whole report, and no substitute in the form of a William Barr letter be put in the hands of every citizen with the patience to read it.

“Nullius in verba,” the Royal Society’s motto from the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, means “We don’t take anyone’s word for it.” A good word to go on.